discussion

OK, so you’ve spent countless hours recording and mixing a new song. It sounds great on your hi-fi system. You are so excited that you drive over to a friend’s house to show it off. You arrive, plug your phone into the stereo receiver, and hit play. As the song comes on, your face turns pale. The song doesn’t sound nearly as good as it did in the studio or at home. In fact, it sounds kind of awful.

This is one of the harder aspects of completing a recording project. Making sure that your recording sounds great on every possible set of speakers. That includes….

Studio speakers

Hi-fi system

Over-ear headphones

In-ear headphones

TV speakers

Crappy PA system

[you get the picture]

Your music, assuming it has reach, will be listened to on any number of playback mediums. Each one has a different frequency response, phase, and mono quality. On top of that, you have room characteristics such as modes and specular reflections. Room modes can either blow your bass up or make it disappear entirely. The room reflections, if extreme, can over-pronounce the top end and make it harsh.

No single set of speakers and rooms can translate to all these scenarios.

As a real-world example, one of my productions (Vertigo) was almost completely missing the bass when played back on some hi-fi systems. Given that the production was supposed to be “finished”, I panicked. Why didn’t I test my mix on a hi-fi system???

Well, I wrongly assumed that my ATC SCM25a’s would translate accurately to hi-fi in all scenarios. The hi-fi system in question had a steeper roll-off on the bass, making the soft 808 kick non-existant. Normally the 100-200hz band makes up for this with a nice hard thump for the kick….unfortunately, that frequency band wasn’t coming through. I ended up boosting that frequency range and now it sounds alot better.

Another unexpected problem scenario is when music is played back on a hi-fi system that is set to DTS or Dolby Surround. What happened in this case? The top end on a couple of tracks was very harsh. To fix this, I tweaked the multiband compression that was already in place to bring the top end under control.

Your audience will not purposely listen to your song in surround but if it does happen, it still has to sound good. If it sounds off then you’re audience is going to get turned off. When all else fails, check your song on that playback medium with a few comparable commercial recordings. If the commercial recording doesn’t sound good (and this assumes that it is well mixed and mastered) then you probably shouldn’t worry about it.

So the moral of the story is, don’t skimp on testing your mixes across different mediums. Listen to it on your phone at the gym. Put it on your hi-fi system and walk around the room. Mono it and put it through some crappy speakers.

It can be tedious but this is your song, and you want it to shine. Even on the shittiest speakers on earth.

One of the more difficult decisions I’ve been facing lately is how to re-master some of my older recordings. Over time, the loudness of music has increased as has the manner in which instruments are mixed. Every track needs to shine in its own right but at the same time it needs to sound inconspicuously similar to tracks in the same/similar genre. If it’s too bright, too warm, too loud, or not loud enough then it’ll stand out in the wrong way.

There’s a lot of mastering services out there, particularly budget mastering for $100-$200 a pop. My experience has been rather lackluster. Perhaps there are some good budget services out there but my impression is that it takes more effort than what $100 is worth to properly master a track.

Say you have a mixed track and you’re mastering it up. So you run it through a subtle enhancer, maybe you adjust the stereo width in a few different frequency ranges, add a little equalization, and finally you run it through a mastering limiter to achieve some specific LUFS (a measure of loudness).

There hasn’t been a single track I’ve mastered that has sounded the way I intended once it’s been through all of that processing. The track will be close but there will always be unintended side effects. Some of the most common:

In my opinion, very few of these issues can be fixed efficiently in the mastering process. Anything you do to the final mix is going to affect multiple elements, even if your intention is to fix only one. So you might as well go back to the mix to make some of your adjustments.

Once you’ve made those adjustments, how do you ensure that the track will line up nicely with other recordings in the same genre?

Sample Magic’s Magic AB has been, well, magic for doing those on-the-fly comparisons. I usually keep a variety of tracks pre-loaded…one super-crushed pop recording, one more acoustic style pop recording, and then another sparser arrangement. I flip between my track and these recordings to get a sense of how they compare. Ideally, they should sound seamless in terms of frequency balance, stereo width, and perceived loudness. But after that, I may make some minor adjustments to taste because there may be a specific sound I’m looking to achieve.

It’s a delicate balance to get it right and I’m not sure I’ve perfected it either. You need a very well treated room, and an excellent pair of speakers (min $6k+). If you are missing one of those two elements, then you may very well be stuck using a mastering service. Just beware if you’re going budget that you get what you pay for.

Drums are a critical element of any mix. You can have a great vocal, with a great instrumental, but without the drums it’ll lose its drive and punch. If you are writing/producing a sweeping ballad then maybe you don’t need to worry. Sometimes you want the listener swept away by the flow of instruments surrounding the vocal and the drums need be minimal, if they are there at all. For everything else, you’ll want those drums sitting cleanly in the mix.

While the drums are usually the first instruments I mix, I will also revisit the drums about 3/4 of the way through the project. I will listen carefully both with the entire mix and when solo’d to double check that the drums are tight and still have the energy to propel the mix forward.

Sometimes, the drums won’t sound right in the full mix, and possibly something has gone awry and they don’t sound right solo’d anymore either. If the drums sound off then here are a few good starting points to fix it up:

Dynamics

Each instrument (kick, snare, toms, …) needs to have the right attack and release times to have impact and ‘hit’ at the right time.

Look at your compressor attack/release — is it smacking down the attack portion of your snare hit? Is the release too slow and therefore you can’t hear the tail of the snare hit?

Try a transient shaper to give that initial hit more impact.

Be careful when playing with the dynamics because instruments with a strong attack can trigger (pump) your bus and/or mastering compressor. Compress judiciously and try a limiter to keep the dynamic range of the instrument contained.

For kicks, the tail (usually sub-bass) portion should have the right release time. You don’t want a kick too boomy (unless it’s hip hop) nor do you want a kick that’s so short it lacks punch.

Tuning: Your kick and snare have a fundamental frequency. Tune it so that it’s in the same key as your song. The kick is particularly important because an out of tune kick will interact with your bass in ways that will not sound pleasant.

Reverb

I find a lot of reverb plug-ins sound terrible for drums. Snares in particular can sound unnatural, so pick a reverb that sounds ‘authentic’ and does not distract from the drum hits. I tend to have more luck with convolution reverbs than other algorithms. Some reverbs can sound good but make the drums sound muddy or unclear. Sometimes I will put a compressor on the drum reverb, side chained back to the drum track. When the drums hit, the reverb will quiet down until the drum hit is complete, at which time the reverb goes back to normal volume. This ensures that the drums have the space in the mix needed to hit the listener cleanly.

Saturation

To give your drums extra punch, try double bussing or running your drums through a tape emulation plug-in. There are also plenty of saturation plug-ins to use as well. Use judiciously. You want enough saturation to make your drums sound larger without sounding unnatural or distorted. I find that some saturation plug-ins can make the low end sound great but have an unpleasing effect on the kick smack. Make sure you’re thinking about the whole kick and not just how the lows hit you in the gut.

Mono vs stereo

My starting point is almost always having the drums in mono (before reverb). If it’s a busy mix, having drums panned across the stereo field can add clutter and make the overall drum section sound weaker. Having the drums (or the key elements thereof) in mono will free up room in your mix for those other musical elements to shine.

The above list is by no means exhaustive but it’s a good starting point for working through problems with your drum track. It’s a mix of science and art so there is never 1 recipe to make it all work. Dial away.

Rhythm is the foundation of almost any song. It provides the skeleton on which all other musical elements are laid. It’s why the drums are (usually) one of the first instruments to be mixed. A good song will have a central rhythm. It is a rhythmic theme that repeats over and over again throughout the song. It is not uncommon to have 2 central rhythmic themes, one for the verses and chorus separately.

The central rhythm of a song can be as important as the vocal hook. It gives a sense of predictability to your song that makes it easy to follow and can be catchy in and of itself. It isn’t necessary for a single instrument to convey the rhythm; the central rhythm can be defined by the interplay of multiple elements in a song.

A great example of this is in The Whistle Song by Flo Rida.

If you listen to the interplay between the drums, the bass synth, and guitars, they form a central rhythm that lasts through the entire record (except a few small sections where the guitars are solo’d). That groove is partially responsible for making the record so catchy.

How does this translate to composition? When I am writing a new instrumental, I may define the central rhythm using a single instrument (guitar, keys, or drums). Either immediately or later in the process, I will split up that rhythm among different instruments to give the track a sense of interplay between the instrumental elements. That rhythm may even vary slightly over the course of the track between sections if variation is called for but it will never stray too far from the central rhythm.

When songwriting, rhythm is equally as important in the topline melody. Frequently we compose the topline melody as a totality of the pitch movements and rhythm. We may even have lyrics already attached to the melody. But this can cloud issues with rhythmic development in the topline.

What is rhythmic development? It is how a rhythm changes as the melody progresses. If it’s exactly the same every bar or every 4 bars, then you have no rhythmic development, which in most (but not all) cases is bad. Your topline ideally needs some variation in rhythm to make it interesting, without changing so much that your audience is lost.

One of my favorite ways of checking the rhythmic development of a topline is to clap it out. Clapping removes all the pitch changes in the melody and gives you sense of what is going on rhythmically. If you clap out your topline and it sounds uninteresting, it may be a problem. Some tracks rely on a repetitive chorus and that may be OK, but in many cases it’s better to have some sort of rhythmic development or, more commonly, a call / response pattern between rhythms.

A great commercial example of rhythmic development is Avril Lavigne’s Smile:

The verses have a strong central rhythm as defined by the drums and electric guitar. Try clapping out the topline in the chorus. You’ll hear how the rhythm evolves in a way that feels natural. The chorus also makes use of rhythmic contrast, where you may have a slower (or less dense) rhythm that progresses into a faster (more dense) rhythm and then potentially back again. It’s another tool for manipulating audience expectation so that your listener isn’t lulled into a slumber.

So, next time you are writing a song, give yourself a round of applause…clap out your topline. It’s like auditioning your song on a different set of speakers. You get that alternate perspective on your work that allows you to fine tune it and take it one step further.

For all those DJs out there, how many times has someone come up to you in the middle of a set and asked “hey!!! can you play that song…I don’t what it’s called but it that goes like this….(insert off key humming with a few lyric scraps)”?

Most DJs have probably lost count but there’s an important lesson here. Before someone is intimately familiar with a song, the first thing that usually sticks in their head is the melody. There may be a few memorable lyrics but the melody tends to hit before those lyrics. How our brains process lyrics vs melody is a bit of a mystery but a little bit of light is shed on it in this article.

Excluding the neuroscience angle, another possibility as to why melody might stick first is because lyrics aren’t always intelligible. You may be in a public place and there is ambient noise. Or you are doing the dishes at home while listening to the radio. When there is noise that distracts or interferes with how we hear the song, the first thing to go is probably the lyrics. The music (including the melody) still has a chance to poke through the noise and so that is your greatest hope of leaving something with the listener when the song is over.

For a songwriter, I think this information is important because it gives an indication of where you need to make the most investment to get your song to pay off. Your song needs to be catchy and you need to make whatever elements hit the listener first as sticky as possible to reel them in. Preferably on that first listen.

Does this mean that you should compose the melody before lyrics? Not necessarily, but composing the melody first can help you focus on coming up with something catchy which, when repeated enough times, will stick in the audience’s head. Working with lyrics first is more limiting because the phonetics of the lyrics will dictate, to some extent, the melody. And the melodic combinations available from a specific set of lyrics may not yield a good enough melody for the song.

In reality, you probably meet somewhere in the middle. You come up with a melody, work out some lyrics, and if the lyrics don’t fit you either change the melody or scrap the lyric. Or vice versa.

This leads to one of my favorite mottos: “sometimes you need sacrifice great lyrics on the altar of a great song”. You may have a killer lyric that is clever or captures an idea really well, but if you can’t make it work melodically and/or rhythmically (hip hop) then you are better off scrapping it. My experience is that having a good lyric with a better topline melody will trump a better lyric with a good melody. If neither is at least good then you probably should rewrite.

In Part 1 we discussed the importance of expectation in writing and producing a great song. A song needs to sound familiar to help the audience relate but at the same time have a few (but not too many) unexpected elements to make it more exciting or add depth.

I think it’s important to note that breaking the rules should always be done in service of the song. We, as writers, want to experiment and stray from the norm out of curiosity….but at the end of the day, the barometer should be whether we have a better song because of it. If breaking a “rule” (ie. what the audience expects) doesn’t enhance the song for the listener then you are better off without it.

Let’s go over a few examples using popular recordings that you might be familiar with.

Our first record is Estelle’s Conquerer.

I think the most obvious break is in the missing pre-chorus before the second chorus. In a pop song with a strong, rallying chorus, I think it’s better to get your audience into the chorus as quickly and as often as possible. So while you may have a pre-chorus after the first verse to build suspense, you are better off doing away with the pre-chorus on the second go-round to give the song a greater sense of motion.

A variation on this is to put the chorus at the beginning of the song. It’s a great way of reeling your audience in quickly but it only works with a strong chorus where the audience can ‘get it’ without the story being told in the verses. An example of a song that does this effectively in Flo Rida’s Whistle Song:

The above examples relate to songwriting but there are some tactics that can be used on the production side to enhance the song. In the case of Owl City’s Fireflies, the first chorus is performed in a breathy voice with stripped down instrumentation to add suspense. The audience was probably expecting a full, hard hitting chorus the first time around but instead they are deprived of it. When the next chorus hits, with more instrumentation, it will hit the audience even harder.

This tactic does fit the song because the theme is about insomnia. So I can picture Adam Young under the covers at midnight singing the first chorus while trying to keep quiet from waking everyone else up.

Another interesting point on this song is after the second chorus, instead of diving into the 3rd verse, a different form of verse is added. This is effective when having more than 2 verses because using the structure Ve Ch Ve Ch Ve Ch can be too repetitive, so inserting something musically different (but not too far off) helps keep the song interesting.

The use of more than 2 verses is different in itself and in some ways allows the omission of a substantial bridge. The verses need to be melodically interesting to use this tactic otherwise that 3rd repetition may seem tired. A good example where using more than 3 verses works well is Pat Beneatar’s We Belong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXUAcMK4S2w

So above we have a few examples of defying audience expectation to enhances a song’s impact. This doesn’t necessarily have to happen in every song that you write but they are a tool that can help your song stand out or become ‘sticky’ in the audience’s mind.

In my early days on the NYC club scene, amongst the flashing neon pink and blue lights of a particular favorite club, a friend once told me:

“Junior [the DJ] is at his best when he’s careening around a corner by the edge of a cliff, and you never know if he’s going to fall off”. The statement made sense at the time but it wasn’t until many years later that I fully appreciated why.

To be great, music requires a tension between predictability (the road) and unpredictability (falling off a cliff). It’s what adds excitement or depth to a song that might otherwise feel static and repetitive. But this concept extends beyond just songwriting. The lyrics, melody, production, and even the live performance need some form of tension to make the song more interesting.

Why is predictability (otherwise called expectation) important? When we hear a song, we need enough familiar elements so that we can understand how to relate to the song. For example…

In songwriting, there is frequently an upward movement in the melody as we move from the verse to the pre-chorus to the chorus. It’s the cue that tells us where the song is going, so we know what to expect.

In production, a dance record needs a 4/4 beat because it serves as a backbone for that steady rhythm to keep you moving on the dance floor. It’s what you expectfrom that genre of music.

The first example is melodic expectation which helps us navigate ‘where we are’ in the song. The second example is genre expectation so that we know stylistically what we are listening to and whether it matches our tastes. There are many more examples which we will touch on later.

So what happens if we write and produce a song with all these ‘rules’ in mind?

Let’s say we make the structure of our song Ver Pre Ch Ver Pre Ch Br Ch Ch. We can use the same instrumentation that’s typical of whatever genre we are targeting. And the lyrics will have the exact same rhyming structure across sections.

What do you think we’ll get?

The song will tend towards the uninteresting. We’ll have to depend more on an original theme, clever lyrics, and/or a unique production to get the audience’s attention. But the ideal situation is that we fire on all cylinders and have something special in every department. For a song to stand out, it needs all the help it can get.

So what are some examples of listener expectation that we can manipulate to make a song more interesting? To be continued in Part 2….

One of the most important yet difficult parts of my work is finding the right vocalist for a song. Unless I wrote the song with/for a particular artist, I can expect to go through 200+ demos before finding the right vocalist. Why be so picky?

How a song is sung can bring it to life or kill it dead in its tracks. Look up covers on YouTube for a popular song and you are guaranteed to find some that are wonderful and others that will make a dog howl and a cat screech. Would the song have been as popular as it was if the original vocal performance was closer to the latter case?

The very basic ingredients for a vocal performance is pitch and rhythm. Arguably these aren’t mandatory anymore with tools like Melodyne and Autotune, but if you are producing a more delicate or natural sounding piece, such as a piano ballad, then there is only a very limited amount of these tools that you can use.

Some vocalists assume that if they have pitch and rhythm, they can sing anything. Artists will send me their demos with a note that they can ‘sing anything’ ‘in any genre’. I have yet to encounter a vocalist who can pull this off. Yes, you can sing in any genre, but to what standard?

What separates a mediocre and great vocal performance for a specific song are: 1) suitable timbre, 2) vocal expression, and 3) inflections. Recording vocals without these ingredients is like baking a cake without the baking soda and seasoning. You’ll end up with a product that is flat and lifeless.

A voice is no different than an instrument in a symphonic orchestra. Different instruments can hit the same note but a composer selects specific instruments for certain passages because of their ability to convey certain emotions better. Each vocalist is, to some extent, a different instrument with their own timbre and need to be treated as such.

A great contemporary example where the timbre of an artist’s voice gels really well with the song is Pat Benatar’s We Belong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXUAcMK4S2w

I have, to this day, never heard a cover that comes close to Pat’s rendition. Her voice has an inexplicable vulnerability in the verses that explodes into a pleading intensity in the chorus’ which (IMO) resonates with the song melodically and lyrically. There is something inherent in Pat’s voice that makes it an ideal fit for her. It feels like her song and I think this, in part, comes from the timbre of her voice.

[NB: There could be an element of the “I heard this version first” effect, to be covered in a later post.]

The final two ingredients for a great song are related but slightly different. Expression is the raw emotional intensity in how a song is sung. Can the singer pull off a convincing pleading voice? What about subtle sarcasm? It’s the emotional intent coming across. The audience isn’t going to feel the emotion just from the lyrics or melody so you have to be sure the vocalist can convey the emotion, preferably without exaggerating.

Inflections are a more specific form of expression and deal with specific ways in which the voice is manipulated to produce an effect. A good example of this is the pronunciation of ‘tokyo’ in the chorus of Iggy Azalea’s Fancy ft Charli XCX.

The ‘o’ sound is exaggerated in a way that makes it memorable. It was the one part of the song that made an impression on my first listen. Each genre will have a vocabulary of inflections that has been used in the past that an audience will recognize, some of which may be specific to an artist. The right vocalist for a song will have the appropriate inflections in their repertoire to give your song some flavour. An even better situation is if the vocalist can come up with new inflections that will be memorable but sound ‘in genre’.

To summarize, the vocalist is the front and center presentation of the song, and the best vocalist for a song is one that can animate the words on the page such that the emotional message comes equally from the delivery, and from the lyrics and melody. To demonstrate this point, I will leave you with an anecdote that I heard at a writing class in London, given by an experienced song writer.

The writer was in Italy and there was a song on the radio. He had no idea what the vocalist was singing (it was in Italian) but it made him think of memories of days gone past, perhaps tinged with some regret of what had happened. He eventually managed to get someone to translate the song, and his interpretation was on the money.

A great song does not make a great recording…the vocalist is one of, if not the, most important elements to get your song across. Make sure its got all the right ingredients to have the same (or better) impact to others as it had to you when you wrote it.

For my first post, I thought it appropriate to discuss how one goes about starting to write a new song. The top methods I hear at networking events or when talking with other people are:

I write music first then I (or someone else) writes the lyrics.

and less commonly:

I wrote the lyrics and then I (or someone else) set it to music.

It all sounds very linear, and sometimes it does work that way, but more often then not it’s an oversimplification.

A great song (IMO) is a jigsaw puzzle of great ideas that come together to make something special. But it really starts with an idea, be it:

Lyrics.

Instrumental idea.

Vocal idea.

Concept / Story

Vibe

If you don’t have an idea you are passionate about to start, then you’re really not anywhere. So you have to experiment using your strengths (guitar playing, synthesizer programming, lyric writing, etc.) to come up with ideas. Or a nice traumatic experience (good or bad) can help as well.

And this leads quite nicely to why this blog is called ‘Writing Garbage’: the vast majority of ideas you come up with will be garbage.

No one on planet earth “sh*ts gold”. And many songwriters fall in love with their work easily and so will claim most, if not all, of what they write is great (there will be a separate post on this). This is a trap.

Starting a song is about writing lots and lots of garbage, until you find that one idea that electrifies you enough to start developing it. Sometimes it’s easy, and sometimes it’s difficult, because it could be a dead end and you’re back to the start of the process.

A childhood friend had this saying whenever he wanted to indicate how difficult and painful something was….he’d say “it’s like masturbating with a cheese grater”.

So keep writing, even when it hurts. Because eventually you’ll find something that moves you. And by the end of the process you’ll feel relieved, because you have something that moves you and hopefully a few other people as well.